[Most 1.12.x] Near Future Technologies (August 26)

[Nertea]

On 6/26/2022 at 12:37 PM, Mossconfig said:

Are you saying that my most recent screenshot still has incorrect EC cost? These numbers are way lower than they used to be before I reinstalled realfuels, but its still installed. Even if they're still high its still better than what I was getting.

 

Huh. No that looks right... I'm kinda confused though - did you solve it? 

[GuessingEveryDay]

I'm struggling to get a SSTO with RAPIERs into space, since the intake maxes the engines out at Mach 1.1. Any idea on how to stop this?

[Mossconfig]

On 7/3/2022 at 9:56 AM, Nertea said:

Huh. No that looks right... I'm kinda confused though - did you solve it? 

no it turns out that realfuels stock has a patch that manually changes the ratio back.

https://github.com/ValentinBischof/RealFuels-Stock/blob/master/GameData/RealFuels-Stock/000_NeedsRework/NFPropulsion/Stockalike_NFPropulsion.cfg

I had deleted the 000_depreciated and NeedsRework folders to fix a broken plume.

 

 

[Zero266]

Quick question, how do I transfer enriched uranium from the predecessor to a reactor?

I have a level 5 engineer on the ship.

[Davi SDF]

12 hours ago, Zero266 said:

Quick question, how do I transfer enriched uranium from the predecessor to a reactor?

I have a level 5 engineer on the ship.

if i am not wrong you can just transfer it like normal liquid fuel, as long as you have the engineer aboard.

[SciMan]

Here's the way it works as I understand it (and it's a pain in the butt, more so than is warranted IMO).

You can't just have the enriched uranium in a processor and transfer it to a reactor. Nope. That would be "too easy", because this is MAGICAL stuff called uranium (in reality it's perfectly plausible, you'd just need specialized equipment to do it, which could be contained in both the reactor and the processor, but "muh game balance" or something, IDK, I hate that it's such a pain in the butt).

Instead, you need the enriched uranium in the processor, and then you need the processor to be below I think 400K (in other words the processor must be made to work in batches).

Once the processor is cooled off enough, you can probably make the transfer happen. I'm not sure, but I think you also need your high-level Engineer kerbal to go on EVA with a kerbal-scale nuclear fuel canister (should be in the "cargo" tab) and interact with the processor to get some uranium, then go to the reactor and insert it.

I don't remember if the reactor also has to be "cold" for the fuel to be inserted or not. I hope not, that would cause SO many problems.
I do know that you have to have the reactor cold to be able to extract depleted fuel from the reactor and feed it to the processor, but I'm also not sure if the processor has to be cold to feed it depleted fuel, it might need that and again that's another massive pain in the butt.

Then again you might be able to do all this without going on EVA, requiring just the high level kerbal in the craft to do the work.

This is the kind of thing that makes me take the NFElectrical ASRG, scale it up by about a factor of 4 (in all respects, size mass and power output), and just use that rather than having to bother with handling enriched uranium.

The problem is the resource transfer rules on the converter.

I know Nertea wants the thing to have to cool down before you can transfer the stuff, but that just doesn't work. It takes too long if you "right-size" your radiators so that they just about meet the needs of the converter. Cooling from operational temperatures to 400k takes what seems to me to be a week of Kerbin days in that case.
Maybe it's shorter than that, maybe massively so. But the point is that it's still too dang long no matter how long it is.

It would be fine if the converter had to be turned off to transfer the stuff. But the temperature shouldn't be how you determine that, else the best way to deal with it would be to size the radiators so that the converter never exceeds the safe temperature of transferring resources.

In fact, there's already another enriched uranium converter (in USI) that is overall much easier to deal with. No "batch mode operation" needed, it just sits there and does its job without needing any micromanagement.
IMO that's what an ISRU converter should do. Sit there and convert things, drawing from and depositing in the requisite containers with absolutely no micro-management needed, no matter if it's Antimatter or Monopropellant or enriched uranium.

That might be because I have 4000 hours of playing Factorio under my belt, and it is my firm opinion that if you can't automate a task, there's probably a reason for that other than "because we want this to be tedious". Yet requiring enriched uranium to be transferred manually seems nothing BUT tedious to me. Sure it's enriched uranium, but it's not like there aren't ways to handle the stuff no matter how radioactive it may be at the time. Hot cells exist, and the only thing preventing them from handling even more radiation is the fact that they need a human operator.

I can see a way to make a much better hot cell using a system of stuff as simple as lead bricks, mechanical periscopes using first-surface metallic mirrors for viewing the task and providing illumination (good luck having radiation damage THAT, also you could theoretically harness some of that intense radiation for the purpose of illumination by having fluorescent tubes in the hot cell and relying on the ambient high radiation of the environment itself to excite the gas contained within, effectively sustaining a mercury gas discharge but with no electrical input), an inert Helium atmosphere (to avoid the atmosphere itself becoming radioactive, or if it does at least the products are useful elsewhere (He3) instead of being pesky radioisotopes of nitrogen and oxygen) and yes, to work on the stuff you'd use very long mechanical or hydro-mechanical remote manipulators.
Note I used no electronics anywhere near the radioactive stuff.
Does it have to use lead bricks? Nope you can make the whole thing a lot bigger and just rely on the 1/R² falloff of radiation with distance instead. That makes it a lot longer, but also a lot lighter. Lead bricks are just used on the "Earth-based" version, for the sake of making it more compact. I guess you could also use lithium bricks if you wanted to harvest some fusion fuel from the whole thing over a really long time, but that starts to sound like an optimization for an actual reactor rather than just a "hot cell".

Oh and those remote manipulators (esp. the hydro-mechanical ones) could totally be controlled electronically, and doing that would also make the hot cell smaller because generally its easier to radiation harden electronics than it is to radiation harden humans.

And why do I mention a hot cell in the first place? Well if you have robot arms in a hot cell that's on the output of a nuclear enrichment converter, what's to stop you from extending that hot cell all the way to say a reactor or other converter that needs enriched uranium?
Would it be heavy? Maybe a little bit, but in space you can skip the heaviest part (radiation shielding aka lead bricks) in favor of distance, like I mentioned earlier. And control cables or electrical power/data wires can be made long without being that heavy, same with structural trusses.

[Ograbme]

I've seen some screenshots of a window called "Near future systems manager". how do I access this?

[king of nowhere]

I thought I had seen some 5 m reaction wheels in this mod, but I can't find them. is my memory tricking me?

[modus]

59 minutes ago, king of nowhere said:

I thought I had seen some 5 m reaction wheels in this mod, but I can't find them. is my memory tricking me?

No not here I think...USI Freight transport technologies does have big reaction wheels.

[NHunter]

18 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

I thought I had seen some 5 m reaction wheels in this mod, but I can't find them. is my memory tricking me?

Well, technically, you can use 5m inline probe core from NFLV as a reaction wheel. Though it will probably be not as good as a "proper" reaction wheel.

You can also try looking into SpaceY. While that mod will kind of duplicate stuff from the aforementioned NFLV, it does have some very interesting reaction wheels for big rockets. Including ones that go on the outside of tanks (surface attached half-circles). Not sure whether those are very realistic, but they are certainly quite useful.

[Superluminal Gremlin]

i swear that there is a 5m reaction wheel in NF Exploration. Or restock plus. One does exist, i just cant remember where

[Space Kerbalisation Tech]

44 minutes ago, TKMK said:

i swear that there is a 5m reaction wheel in NF Exploration. Or restock plus. One does exist, i just cant remember where

There is a 5m probe core/reaction wheel in NFLV

[Superluminal Gremlin]

ah ok. 

[king of nowhere]

On 7/18/2022 at 7:52 AM, NHunter said:

Well, technically, you can use 5m inline probe core from NFLV as a reaction wheel. Though it will probably be not as good as a "proper" reaction wheel.

You can also try looking into SpaceY. While that mod will kind of duplicate stuff from the aforementioned NFLV, it does have some very interesting reaction wheels for big rockets. Including ones that go on the outside of tanks (surface attached half-circles). Not sure whether those are very realistic, but they are certainly quite useful.

just checked them. they are no more powerful than the regular 2.5 m reaction wheels, while weigthing 3 times as much.

I supposed it can be used as a thermal covering... for a spaceplane during reentry, since they have very high heat resistance... except that a spaceplane covered in reaction wheels would be too heavy to fly, so I'll just file them as "useless junk".

As I am looking for ways to save on part count on large vehicles, that would otherwise require 100+ stock wheels.

the 5 m core at least has some actual torque to it; still, it's as strong as 3 regular wheels, while being 8 times heavier.

seems like I will have to make rescale some stock parts if I want to get some big reaction wheels

[modus]

1 hour ago, king of nowhere said:

Seems like I will have to make rescale some stock parts if I want to get some big reaction wheels

@king of nowhere not necessarily. Like I said 

On 7/17/2022 at 1:52 PM, modus said:

USI Freight transport technologies does have big reaction wheels.

 

[bigyihsuan]

6 hours ago, king of nowhere said:

just checked them. they are no more powerful than the regular 2.5 m reaction wheels, while weigthing 3 times as much.

I supposed it can be used as a thermal covering... for a spaceplane during reentry, since they have very high heat resistance... except that a spaceplane covered in reaction wheels would be too heavy to fly, so I'll just file them as "useless junk".

As I am looking for ways to save on part count on large vehicles, that would otherwise require 100+ stock wheels.

the 5 m core at least has some actual torque to it; still, it's as strong as 3 regular wheels, while being 8 times heavier.

seems like I will have to make rescale some stock parts if I want to get some big reaction wheels

I think at that size, you shouldn't be using reaction wheels and instead (or in addition) be using RCS. NFLV has some giant monoprop and biprop RCS ports for this exact reason

Edited July 23, 2022 by bigyihsuan

[king of nowhere]

 

6 hours ago, modus said:

@king of nowhere not necessarily. Like I said USI Freight transport technologies does have big reaction wheels.

 

right, they do! 20% heavier than stock ones, but the biggest are 270 times stronger.

56 minutes ago, bigyihsuan said:

I think at that size, you shouldn't be using reaction wheels and instead (or in addition) be using RCS. NFLV has some giant monoprop and biprop RCS ports for this exact reason

that was my original plan too. unfortunately, won't work. i am tyring to beat my own size records, which means a lot.

 

for I have decided to make a manned landing on the saturn moons in kerbalism. the problem is that there is a really huge radiation belt that will kill any kerbal coming near in a few hours. kerbalism offers a few strategies to cope with radiations, but none effective there. except potentially one: the active shield, which reduces radiations by a tiny amount.

I calculated that I will need 7500 tons of active shields to nullify the radiation belt of saturn. and I decided to make it a personal matter, and do exactly that.

Of course I will also need fuel and stuff - mostly fuel, a lot of it because it takes 4 km/s just to get an intercept from earth to mars or venus, and from there i can start working with gravity assists. it would take 8 km/s to go straight to saturn.

So all things considered I estimate 50k tons of ship. but with those oversized parts I can keep it all under 1000 parts, so it's good.

the problem is launching. I know, from previous experience, that I can only launch about 1000 tons (orbital payload) at a time. Any bigger than that, and the launch vehicle necessary is so huge, it crashes my pc. literally.

So I have to make a 50k tons ship that I can send to orbit and dock in several dozen 1000 ton parts. I'm thinking a central core of a dozen modules with the radiation shields, with the drop tanks attached laterally.

In all this, I'd really rather not try to figure out how to bind the rcs. If i put it on the central core, I risk its exhaust being blocked by the drop tanks and becoming ineffective. If I put it on the drop tanks, I will drop it eventually.

Putting on a single oversized reaction wheel per segment is just so much more practical.

[shimmy00]

I've noticed a time warp issue with the electrical systems in the quad pack of mods consisting of this, Dynamic Battery Storage, System Heat, and Far Future Technologies in that if the NFE reactors (the SystemHeat versions) are put in with enough power draw and modest battery storage there will be power cut outs at high timewarp (10000x or more) which in one case are universally causing the FFT antimatter tanks to detonate and ruining the craft. The only workaround that seems to work is manually boosting the generation rate on the reactor, i.e. it seems to have to do with automatic throttle-down and I'm guessing electricity is transiently depleted before DBS can kick in and buffer it. Could this be fixed somehow? I am not sure where to ask this because I run all 4 mods together, but I figured this thread looks more active than the DBS one.

[Nertea]

Need a test case.

[FutureMartian97]

Are there any RO configs for these? 

[Aaron11]

我安装了最新版本但是发现CKAN不支持，请问这是咋回事啊？

Quote

I installed the latest version but found that CKAN does not support it, what is going on?

 

DLL for module NearFutureElectrical found at               ║

│║ GameData/NearFutureElectrical/Plugins/NearFutureElectrical.dll, but it's ║

│║ not where CKAN would install it. Aborting to prevent multiple copies of ║

│║   the same mod being installed. To install this module, uninstall it    ║

│║                         manually and try again.

Edited July 30, 2022 by Vanamonde
Please post in English when not using the International subforums.

[Brigadier]

@Aaron11Hopefully my translation is accurate.

5 hours ago, Aaron11 said:

我安装了最新版本但是发现CKAN不支持，请问这是咋回事啊？

Quote

I installed the latest version but found that CKAN did not support it.

CKAN definitely supports NFE.  Did you follow those directions and completely remove NFE with CKAN, manually delete any left over NFE folders and only then try to reinstall?

[Thatguywholikesionengines]

How would I go about converting the hall thrusters and other engines (really, as many as I can make work) to run on LH2? I like the small RCS blocks a lot, but they're, well, small. I want that kinda performance with my beloved liquid hydrogen on some bigger things!

[mikegarrison]

1 hour ago, Thatguywholikesionengines said:

How would I go about converting the hall thrusters and other engines (really, as many as I can make work) to run on LH2? I like the small RCS blocks a lot, but they're, well, small. I want that kinda performance with my beloved liquid hydrogen on some bigger things!

Um.

For physics reasons, you want ion thrusters to use heavy atoms. You very, very much would not want them to use the lightest possible atom. If reality and physics are not important to you though, do what you like.

[Jacke]

9 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

For physics reasons, you want ion thrusters to use heavy atoms. You very, very much would not want them to use the lightest possible atom. If reality and physics are not important to you though, do what you like.

I think the previous poster is confusing the desire with rocket engines with heated high-temperature exhaust to have the lightest average atomic particle mass.  @mikegarrison, you are quite right that engines with electro-magnetic acceleration of the fuel want the highest average atomic particle mass.

Edited August 4, 2022 by Jacke